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The Therapeutic Value of Indian Classical, Folk and Innovative Dance Forms

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Arpita Chatterjee, Barasat College, West Bengal State University, India

Dance provides an active, non-competitive form of exercise that has potential positive effects for physical health as well as mental and emotional wellbeing. Dance therapy is based on the idea that body and mind are co-relational. The therapeutic approaches with various forms of Indian dances are a new entrant to dance literature. Ayurveda held dance as a power of healing (therapy) and inner awareness (psychology). Indian philosophy also supports the facts of Sangeet (song, dance and music) for benefit of human health physically as well as mentally. The powerful dance form of Bhangra (Punjab), Karagam (Tamilnadu), Chou, Rayabese, Dhali (West Bengal) gives good health and strength. The fast footwork of Kathak dance helps to release anger and tension. Manipuri dancers make rounded movements and avoid any jerks, sharp edges or straight lines. It gives them undulating and soft appearance, proper body control and peace of mind. All these body movements, body balancing, expression, muscle movement, muscle constriction and relaxation have a strong effect on therapeutic movements. In India today the dance therapists are conscious about this matter and in therapeutic sessions they actually improvise different dance movements according to the need. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Cities of Struggle and Resistance: The Image of the Palestinian City in Modern Arabic Poetry

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Saddik M.Gohar, UAE University, UAE

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Abstract

This paper aesthetically articulates the representation of the Palestinian city in modern Arabic poetry in order to argue that while Arab -and non-Arab poets-incorporate  variety of attitudes toward the city ,  the presentation of the Palestinian city reveals a radical difference from the rest of Arabic and non-Arabic poetry  due to the peculiar history of struggle, resistance and victimization characterizing life in the Palestinian metropolis.  To the Palestinian poets, in particular, the city is part of a homeland they have lost or a refugee camp that has been resisting the invaders for decades.  Contrary to western cities  inhabited by alien residents such as Eliot’s Prufrock, or Arab cities populated by strangers, outsiders, whores, outcasts and political prisoners  as in the literary  cities of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab  and Ahmed Abdul-Muti  Hejazi , the Palestinian city is inhabited by heroes and martyrs.  These heroes who appear in contemporary Palestinian poetry and take different shapes personify the struggle and resistance of a nation that has frequently refused to surrender at times of crisis.  Representing the spirit of the Palestinian people confronting  a world replete with  treachery and hypocrisy,  the Palestinian city and its nameless heroes , in contemporary Arabic  poetry, is an embodiment of  an eternal and unlimited Palestinian dream , the dream of return, rebirth and liberation.  In this context, the paper affirms that unlike Arab cities which are associated with decadence, corruption, exploitation and moral bankruptcy, the Palestinian city,  due to the Palestinian history of exile, resistance, victimization and pain, is viewed in Arabic/Palestinian poetry as a location of heroism,  struggle, defiance and martyrdom. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

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Challenging Enlightenment Paradigms: Responses of Benjamin and Tagore

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Debmalya Das, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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Abstract

European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a paradigm shift in its perception of time and in the practice of historiography. The idea of linear/teleological classification of time and the notion of empirical documentation of history was combined with the notion of progress, which saw civilization as a development from the state of barbarity to that of refinement. The appropriation of this progressivist ideology by the powerful in society has served as a tool of domination. Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Crisis in Civilization”(1941), written in the wake of World War II, provide us with two radical perspectives which challenge such progressivist assumptions. Expanding the critical span into their other writings, this paper seeks to historicize the two figures in their varied positions of marginality as two counter-Enlightenment ideologues, writing at a moment of human history when the idea of being civilized was continually threatened by manifestations of barbarity in the socio-political/cultural dynamics of the entire world. Keep Reading

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In the World of Men: Tagore’s Arrival in the Spiritual Domain of Nationalism

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Banibrata Goswami, Panchakot Mahavidyalaya, India

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in a family which, on one hand, inherited a legacy of rich Indian culture, and on the other, did not hesitate to welcome the modernism, freshly arrived from Europe through waves of Enlightenment. He was sent early to England to imbibe the gifts of modern science and rationalism that could lead him to a standard and secured career. But even though the discipline of work, love for liberalism and quest after scientific truth and technological perfection there impressed him much, in its over all effect the West’s efforts of de-humanization disappointed Tagore and disillusioned him as well. This led him finally to the realization and reconstruction of the motherland that is India. He came to meet the common man and his everyday sorrows and tears in rural Bengal, in Silaidaha, Patisar and Sazadpur where he was given the duty to look after the family estate. The raw and rough smell of the soil, the whirl of the waves in river Padma, the play of seasons on the strings of nature lent him a unique insight. He learnt to weave his words offering a perfect slide show of mutual reciprocation of man and nature, accompanied by a hitherto unheard melody of folk tune that glorifies the struggles of that life and thereby consolidating it gradually to a consciousness out of which a nation is born. The present essay intends to seek and understand the secrets of that story, which, though lacking miserably in sound and fury, strives towards a steady self emergence and emancipation paving the way for political freedom. Keep Reading

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Representation of the ‘National Self’— Novelistic Portrayal of a New Cultural Identity in Gora

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Dipankar Roy,Visva-Bharati, India

 Abstract

Any colonial rule involves a systematic and ruthless attack on the culture and heritage of the colonized race. This often results in a total loss or at least maiming of the sense of ‘self’ for the colonized people. The masculinist self of the colonizer labels the self of the colonized as ‘effeminate’. In reaction to this, the nationalist consciousness of the colonized people often tries to replicate the macho virility of the colonial masters in an act of fashioning a ‘nationalist self.’ In the context of Indian colonial history we see development in similar lines. But, the codification of the dominant strand of the nationalist consciousness in overt masculinist terms often have strange reverberations. This paper is about such an act of fashionning selves and its after-effects. To study the issue in the Indian colonial contexts I have chosen Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora as a case-study. The conception of this novel’s central character is largely modelled on the issue of an ‘ideal’ national self.  The author, however, by observing the dialogic principle consistently in the text, problematises the dominant ideas connected with the figure of ‘nationalist self’. How he does it will be my main concern in this article. Whether it is possible to arrive at a general tendency of the nature of India’s colonial encounter with the British in relation to the issue of the development of the national character will be dealt with in the concluding section of this essay. Keep Reading

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Border Identity Politics: The New Mestiza in Borderlands

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Lamia Khalil Hammad

Yarmouk University, Irbid-Jordan

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.08

Abstract

This paper investigates Anzaldua’s Borderlands, first, for its radical theory of the mestiza consciousness and how it would establish the border identity for the Chicana/o people.Anzaldua’s Borderlands exemplifies the articulation between the contemporary awareness that ‘all’ identity is constructed across difference and argues for the necessity of a new politics of difference to accompany this new sense of self.  Borderlands maps a sense of the plurality of self, which Anzaldua calls mestiza or border consciousness. This consciousness emerges from a subjectivity structured by multiple determinants—gender, class, sexuality—in competing cultures and racial identities.    Keep Reading

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Political Economy, Alexander Von Humboldt, and Mexico’s 1810 and 1910 Revolutions

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José Enrique Covarrubias

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico

Richard Weiner

Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.02

 Introduction

2010 is a significant year in Mexico since it is the centennial of the 1910 Revolution and the bicentennial of the 1810 Revolution for independence.[i] Next year will also be historic since it will mark the bicentennial of the publication of Alexander von Humboldt’s highly influential 1811 study about Mexico, Ensayo político sobre el reino de la Nueva España.  One of the novel features of this article is that it examines the ties between Humboldt’s famous 1811 work and Mexico’s Revolutions of 1810 and 1910. While Humboldt’s impact has been stressed for the independence era, it has been entirely unnoticed for the 1910 Revolution. By showing Humboldt’s enduring influence, this essay will demonstrate an important connection between the two Revolutions that has been overlooked. While Humboldt remained prominent throughout, the discourse about him varied significantly in the 1810 and 1910 Revolutions. Additionally, this essay will suggest that Humboldt’s influence during the age of the 1810 Revolution was more complex and varied than conventional wisdom—which emphasizes his contribution to the idea of Mexico as a land of vast natural abundance—acknowledges.[ii] Keep Reading

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Living in the Theme Park: A Textual Tour of Savannah’s Public Squares

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Tom Lavazzi

Kingsborough Community College, New York, USA

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I  Download PDF Version

 DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n1.03

About the Paper

In drafting this essay, the author has counter-posed two compositional strategies, one based on conventional rhetorical structures, founded in enlightenment concepts of sequential logic, rationality, and isomorphism—i.e., the standard, academically sanctioned thesis essay form, proceeding in an orderly and hierarchical manner from head (main idea) through body (detailed breakdown and investigation of thesis points—equivalent to scientific testing or proof of an initial  hypothesis/proposal, deploying transitions and focal topics to govern and control the content of each subsequent investigative unit (paragraph).  From this perspective, the essay structure is very much the rhetorical double of the city plan it proposes to elucidate.  Working against this more panoptically controlled hierarchical structure, is a postmodern turn toward [Internet] www-based, non-sequential organization.  Hence, certain sections of the essay are potentially arrived at via mock-URLs, suggesting the tentative, self-consciously constructed, unnatural nature of the smoothly flowing logical structure; at any moment, a different link could be selected, interrupting/disrupting/complicating the logical and sequential arrangement.  Also along these alinear lines are bolded fragments of text, suggesting an associational pattern of connectivity among images and ideas destabilizing and rendering motile the more static, rationally secured surface of the final product. Keep Reading

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“The Noble Savage and the Civilised Brute: Nature and the Subaltern Angst in Swarup Dutta’s Machh Master (The Expert Angler)

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Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Parallel reading of history from the subaltern point of view is not only possible, but it also often proves to be revealing. It often unearths a new discourse, which challenges the canonized history or even subverts it. This paper offers a reading of a recent Bhasa (Bangla) novel Machh Master (The Expert Angler) where the Naxalite Movement that rocked Bengal in the sixties, has been narrated and analysed from the viewpoint of one dalit subaltern. The novel attempts to create a binary between this ‘uncorrupted’ world/mode of existence and the civilized, sophisticated, intellectual, but essentially ‘corrupted’ urban world. In this natural savage world and its eco-system, the urban, elitist Naxalite movement turns out to be nothing but an imposition and an intrusion. At the end, disillusioned Neul detaches himself from this movement, goes back to, and embraces Nature in a desperate bid to get back his pre-lapserian mode of existence. Neel, chief agent of the Naxalite movement, too is influenced by these children of Mother Nature, and undergoes a transformation. This paper explores this interesting role of Nature in this new reading of the history of mankind. Keep Reading

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Finding the voice of the Peasant: Agriculture, Neocolonialism and Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab trilogy

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Jonathan Highfield, Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, USA

 Abstract

Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab trilogy–The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942)–speaks directly to the destruction of traditional agricultural systems under colonial rule and the absorption of the agricultural goods and human labor of India into a global economic system. The Punjab trilogy traces the life of a character searching for another India, an India free of oppression, misery, and classism. Lalu Singh looks at the situation in the Punjab from an ever-widening orbit, only to recognize that global movements devalue the very people they purport to help. In the end he rejects theory for action, returning to the peasant society he fled as a youth. His decision has resonance in the twenty-first century as formerly colonized regions face the neocolonial onslaught of biopiracy and genetic trait control technologies. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

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